The Passion Of The Boehner

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So, it seemswe will have John Boehner to kick around a little longer, since the feral children couldn't get their shit together enough to depose him. I believe I made the point earlier this week that it was entirely possible that Boehner will keep his job because nobody really wants his job enough to take it away from him. You want to be the Grand Marshal Of The Tournament Of Dolts Parade? The ringmaster of Cirque du Idiotes? The concierge in Bedlam? Hell, neither do I.

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There's some smart money saying that Boehner's re-election is another signal that the fever has broken, and that the new Congress will be a little less Lord Of The Flies than the last one. I think the only way that's true is if Boehner manages to keep his more feverish colleagues angry, but not entirely mutinous, or if the Republican caucus simply dissolves into the gang fight one afternoon. Boehner's 220-192 tally isn't exactly a landslide, and he probably owes his re-election at least in large part to the support on the part of several of the wing commanders who defected from the Batshit Escadrille, including our old friend, the Girl With The Faraway Eyes.

After the vote tally looked close to the number that would require a second vote, a handful of the Republicans who had abstained then changed their vote to Boehner. Those abstainer-to-Boehner flippers were Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, and Scott Garrett.

Those are some of the folks to whom he owes his speakership. (The others work, not in Congress, but in various corporate boardrooms, and they were the ones who got tired of Congress frightening the horses.) I'm not as optimistic as most people that we have reached the point where the louder voices from the fringe no longer carry as far as they once did. Where else is Boehner going to go for support? There are no Republican moderates any more, not in the House Of Representatives, anyway. That's part of the reason nobody else wanted the job enough to run seriously for it. The only way at the moment for any Speaker presiding over this Republican majority to get the influence a Speaker should have is to adopt positions so far into the izonkosphere that the rest of the country laughs nervously and crosses the street when it seems him coming.

Boehner seems willing at least to bruise a few heads to keep things on the rails; this Tim Huelskamp character may never stop whining about his wounded fee-fee. But there's not yet any reason to believe Boehner can (or will) deliver come March, when the real nut-cutting begins. A guy in a job nobody else wanted may yet again be turned into a guy nobody wants in the job.